Internet Chess
Links to sites for playing chess on-line
There are a couple of ways you can play chess online; by email or on a chess server.
Chess by mail
This follows the same principle as Postal Chess except, of course, it uses email. There are a few sites which can help you make contact with others wanting to play and act as a post-office of sorts to collect statistics and such.- CorrespondenceChess.com
- International Correspondence Chess Federation
- Irish Correspondence Chess Association
- WORLD CORRESPONDENCE CHESS FEDERATION
- International Email Chess Group
- International E-mail Chess Club
Check out Chessopolis for more links; also look for Web-interfaces for a slightly different experience.
Chess Servers
Generally all chess servers use the same technology, allowing you to play over the Internet in real-time. The great advantage of such servers is you can usually find a match at any time of the day, since visitors to these servers are world-wide in every time zone. On some servers, you can even play (or watch) Grand Masters or better.There are two types of server:
- Free Servers
- These are publicly available servers which anyone can access and join.
- FICS: Free Internet Chess Server - web page - telnet to server
- Australian FICS - web page - telnet to server
- Brazilian FICS - web page - telnet to server
- Chilean FICS - telnet to server
- Croatian FICS - telnet to server
- Dutch FICS - web page - telnet to server
- French FICS - web page - telnet to server
- German FICS - web page - telnet to server
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- International Champion Chess Network (ICS) - web page - telnet to server
- Commercial Chess Servers
- Basically you often have
to pay (one way or another) for using these servers, which operate
either as or by commercial organisations, although you can usually play
for free as an anonymous player. Many of these servers are not compatible with ICS technologies so you play using programs like Xboard or Winboard.
- ICC: Internet Chess Club (ICS) - web page - telnet to server
- Chess.Net (ICS) - web page - telnet to server

